The present invention relates generally to monitoring systems and more particularly, to a system and method for monitoring and analyzing one or more pieces of telecommunication network equipment via a rule based system.
It is often desired to monitor specific pieces of equipment of a telecommunication network. Traditionally, the monitoring has been provided in a flat-file, data dump format. For example, a conventional monitoring system can show if a piece of equipment in a network is up or down.
However, it is often desired to have a deeper analysis of the equipment. Consider for example an inter-office facility, or xe2x80x9cIOFxe2x80x9d. An IOF can generically represent any node (or group of nodes) in a telecommunication network, and more specifically identifies one or more pieces of equipment used to interconnect various links or nodes, such as other networks, telephone lines, and/or trunks.
One way to monitor equipment in an IOF is to use a system called the Trunks Integrated Record Keeping System (xe2x80x9cTIRKSxe2x80x9d). TIRKS is commonly used to help a regional bell operating company (xe2x80x9cRBOCxe2x80x9d) determine if facilities exist to provide service, track order completion, fulfill circuit orders, and perform inventory planning.
Although TIRKS provides a great detail of information, the method of acquiring the information is very long and tedious. For example, in order to review equipment of an IOF, many steps must be performed on TIRKS. The information provided by TIRKS is in a raw-data format, and must be manually complied into a tabular form to represent the desired information (e.g., exhaust conditions of one or more pieces of equipment). If there is an exhaust condition, a new job must be created for TIRKS, and a job story must be manually created to satisfy various RBOC reporting requirements.
What is desired is a system and method that automatically monitors one or more pieces of equipment, analyzes the pieces of equipment, and creates review and/or reports from the analysis.